[OSM-talk] Call to Take Action and Confront Systemic Offensive Behavior in the OSM Community

[Martin Constantino–Bodin]

Hi,

I’m afraid that you misunderstood me: I was responding to Florimond 
Berthoux as I was recognising what he was saying as something like “This 
call is reverse racism”. I was quoting this Wikipedia article as it 
presents the concept of reverse racism, and the history of the believe 
of this concept, whilst making clear that this concept does correspond 
to anything real, hence showing how ridiculous his claims were. (See for 
instance the sentence “While not empirically supported, belief in 
reverse racism is widespread in the United States”.) My point was to 
show that this call of action is not reverse racism, nor a hate speech, 
nor anything like that — in contrary to what Florimond Berthoux 
repeatedly claimed.

It is now evident that I wasn’t clear, and I apologise for this. English 
is not my native language, and I am repeatedly reminded of that. So 
instead of expressive myself, let me link to another message in this 
discussion to which I wholeheartedly agree with: 
https://www.mail-archive.com/talk@openstreetmap.org/msg65302.html ☺

Regards,
Martin.

>> Er… Please read this article: 
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_racism 
>
> This article acknowledges the existence of reverse racism, describes 
> its history and reasons its proponents are using. Please do not use it 
> as a justification for reverse racism, encyclopedia articles are not 
> for promoting opinions.
>
> In practice, all racist ideologies, including these that have ended in 
> atrocities, had some kind of justification behind them. Reverse racism 
> is not an exception.
>
>> This call is not a hate speech against white-people.
>>
> The proposal was all about forcing governance changes to codify 
> discrimination against some members of our community. This is a 
> definition of systemic discrimination and we still have not seen a 
> word of apology for it.
>
>
> To be clear, I strongly support your goals but the means are totally 
> unacceptable. For start, they stand against everything you are trying 
> to fix. They violate our governance by demanding that the OSMF board 
> implements changes it was not elected for. Finally, they are outright 
> illegal in many countries we operate in, places that currently benefit 
> from a democratic, grass-root project OSM is.
>
>
> -ndrw